Beautiful Blantyre?

I've been told to write a description of Blantyre, so here it is for those of you who are interested. I don't have any photos yet as I don't feel overly safe carrying my camera around, and it would appear that some of the local Malawians hate having their photo take even more than I do!

Blantyre is a lot hillier than I was expecting. I was looking out of the window as my plane flew into South Africa and everything I saw looked unbelievably flat. Not here. We're surrounded by a few mountains (after which Dominic's school houses are named) and apparently one of them is so tall that it is still snow capped...I'm afraid I'm going to have to be a doubting Thomas and say I'll believe it when I see it!

It is very hot here. At night we sleep with the windows open and it's still too hot (for me) even without my sheet. And it's only going to get hotter as we approach the wet season, which starts mid way through November. This means that currently it is very dry and dusty.

In general it is quite poor here – the shops are quite run down, most people walk or use the minibuses, there are people begging on the streets etc. but then there also seems to be a fair number of big cars (not all owned by expats!) and I even saw a sports car the other day! The houses we've looked at are large with big gardens and cost around £600 p/m unfurnished, and there are plenty of them, so there must be quite a market for them. The city is split up into areas, and there is quite a divide – some of them have loads of these big expensive houses with massive gardens, security and servants' quarters, whereas other areas are just stuffed full to bursting with small, poor quality, decrepit houses. Nobody here seems to own their own house – everyone rents, even those in the squalid houses.

The river, which flows through the city centre, is absolutely disgusting and the area around it stinks. Most buildings are one storey and most houses are bungalows although there are taller hotels and office blocks in the city centre.

I haven't seen much in the way of wildlife (mosquitoes excepted...) but I'm pretty sure there's plenty of it when you move away from the cities.

Food wise I'm not finding it very hard to be veggie. There's a nice vegetarian restaurant in town, and a few fairly well stocked supermarkets. I haven't done enough food shopping back home to compare prices, but mum says instant coffee is expensive and I can tell that chocolate costs a lot. Sad times :( (our address is name C/O Susan Heyes, College of Medicine, Medicine Department, Private Bag 360, Chichiri, Blantyre 3 – jokes! Sort of...!!)

The roads are interesting – there are a few main roads which are fairly wide and reasonably (I think) well tarmacked, but the pavements are just the side of the road marked by yellow line which in most places has all but disappeared! The lorries are very slow and everyone else is very impatient which leads to the maddest overtaking I've seen in my life! The situation only gets worse when there are fuel shortages as this results in queues for petrol stations miles long down the roads! Other smaller roads are pretty bad – lots of pot holes, narrow etc. and I can imagine they get pretty treacherous when the wet season arrives!

The minibuses are CRAZY! They are the only viable form of public transport as there are no trains or normal buses. There are some coaches but I think they are mainly for long distance. In the UK I guess these minibuses would seat about 10 passengers. Over here they try to make sure they have around 12 and I've heard of them seating 7, with more hanging on outside! They aren't obviously (to me) marked with their destination, there is no timetable (they just go when they're full) and no obvious stops as far as I can tell. So if you want to get on one you just have to keep flagging them down until one of them with spaces stops, and then try to find one going where you want to go, which is hard because there is slight language barrier and I find that the just want the fare (around 30p) so they'll say yes to whatever you ask them whether they are actually going where you want or not! This has resulted in me ending up on completely the wrong minibus going to quite a poor area of Blantyre which meant that more and more people were staring at me on the bus trying to work out why this white person was still there! It then reached the end of it's journey and, when I still hadn't got off, the driver asked me where I was trying to get to. This was when I discovered I was on the wrong one. Anyway, I made it home safe later on that day. And getting off them is another hurdle completely! Back home we have buttons to press to request the next stop. Here, when the minibus is getting close (hard to tell when you don't know the area) you're supposed to just shout out the name of where you want to get off. Unfortunately it would seem that we and the locals use totally different land marks and so they have no idea where we mean when we request to get off! We're slowly getting the hang of it, though.

In terms of the social side of life I'm afraid to say I haven't investigated it much since my reggae venture into Club X! Shop-wise there is quite a choice. We have Chichiri shopping mall, which contains a few shops selling various things from stationery to clothes, a large supermarket and a shop called game which sells food, household items, electrical items, bedding etc. There is also a cinema, showing fairly recent films (Harry Potter and Transformers are on at the moment, plus a few that I hadn't heard of, but I think are other new western films). I'm excited about utilising that! There are lots of shops in the city centre, but I haven't looked too closely at those yet. Most of these shops seem to have all their items behind the counter and you have to ask them to find what you want – you can't really browse through their stuff. This therefore requires you to know what you want before you go to town – no window shopping here! Also in town is a massive flea market selling everything of no value and little of any real use! That's not fair, they sell clothes and shoes, lots of electrical and DIY bits and pieces and there is a food market behind where there are lots and lots of stalls all selling the same vegetables! There is also a meat and fish section but I passed through that part as quickly as I could! People seem to use whatever land they can find, be it on a road island or a roundabout, to grow vegetables to sell, so these are available all along most major roads too, as well as the flea market in town. There are a couple of other markets throughout Blantyre but I've only passed those I haven't actually been in them. I find them quite stressful as everyone tries to get you to buy their stuff and I suspect they mark it up quite a but when they see a white person coming. I'm going to have to bite the bullet at some point and get bartering, as I can see that's going to come in handy at some point over the coming year!

I can't really think of anything else to describe to you so, if you haven't fallen asleep by now, thank you for reading. If you have fallen asleep, thanks for trying!

God Bless,

Julez

xxxx